LTE And LTE Advanced Frequency Bands And Spectrum Allocations

The LTE frequency bands in 3GPP standards are divided into paired bands and unpaired bands. Some of the bands are presently used by other technologies and LTE can coexist with the legacy technologies.

In the best case in Europe there is over 600MHz of spectrum available for the mobile operators when including the 800, 900, 1800, 2100 and 2600MHz Frequency Division Duplex (FDD) and Time Division Duplex (TDD) bands.

In the USA the LTE networks will initially be constructed on 700 and 1700/2100 MHz frequencies. In Japan the LTE deployments begin using the 2100 band followed later by 800, 1500 and 1700 bands.

Flexible bandwidth is desirable to take benefit of the diverse spectrum assets: refarming typically requires a narrowband option below 5MHz while the new spectrum allocations could take advantage of a wideband option of data rates of 20MHz and higher.

It is also evident that both FDD and TDD modes are required to take full advantage of the available paired and unpaired spectrum. These requirements are taken into account in the LTE system specification.